This World Food Day, individuals and organizations will come to the table to explore solutions to hunger across the globe.
Approximately 645 million people currently face chronic hunger, and more than two billion don’t have access to adequate nutrition. The world already produces ample food, and the key is getting it from the people who grow it to the people who need it.
But we can't talk about food without talking about farmers. And we can’t talk about farmers without talking about climate change.
How can farmers navigate a changing world?
At Kiva, we talk about it all: In tandem with our Lending Partner organizations and individual lenders, we work to help farmers in climate-impacted regions by providing access to loans, financial services, and other tools of economic resilience.
Reflecting World Food Day 2026’s theme of “Innovate Today, Nourish Tomorrow,” Kiva has been developing new tools for individuals and communities impacted by increased drought, flooding, pollution, and other disruptions caused by a changing planet over the last several years.
Innovative applications include the Climate Compass, an assessment tool that collects information from more than 30 Lending Partners about the specific needs and challenges their clients are experiencing related to climate change. The insights gleaned from these localized sources are then compiled and shared in the Climate Smart Toolkit, deployed to provide support for real-world solutions.
Kiva Lending Partners VisionFund Kenya and Juhudi Kilimo provide illustrative examples. Both of these microfinance institutions (MFIs) offer loans to smallholder farmers, whose livelihood is at the mercy of the weather—and therefore, so are the lenders.
As one of Africa's largest economies, Kenya depends on rain-driven agriculture, and it’s not just smallholder farmers who are affected.
“Imagine if Kenya has a drought, and then all of a sudden, half of their farmers can't repay their loans. So obviously, those farmers are at risk because of this climate event, and also the institution,” explains Michelle Schenck, Kiva’s Senior Grant Project Manager.
Such an event would be catastrophic environmentally and economically for the community, but facing the question before it happens can help offset the effects, continues Schenck.
“If the rains don't come—or the rains come too much—how do we de-risk those farmers so that they don't lose their entire crop and have no money?”
Fortunately in Kenya, they already had a head start.
Building capacity with a GIZ grant
VisionFund Kenya had already piloted a program called Climate Cash, which provides crop insurance to farmers. However, they didn’t find many takers.
“Either they can't get the farmers to take it because they don't understand it, or they've tried it and they had a bad experience,” says Schenck.
That’s where Kiva’s assessment tools come in. By investigating how the product is presented, observing how loan officers talk about it with their clients, and evaluating questions clients had, the consulting team is helping to activate improvement to the crop insurance program and scale it to more farmers.
These services were made possible with a GIZ grant, part of an international fund that supports environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Kiva was awarded the grant to use for capacity-building or technical assistance, and Schenk says the most effective way to use those funds is to continue to help its Lending Partners refine and improve their services.
“The grant is specifically focused in Kenya, and the goal of the grant is to increase climate resilience of the institutions we work with as well as the smallholder farmer clients,” she affirms, adding, “the reason we can do what we do is because of our local partners.”
Deploying loans—and more—worldwide
The Climate Compass, Climate Smart Toolkit, and other resilience programs are becoming available to more of Kiva’s Lending Partners around the globe.
That’s good news to someone like Ion, a smallholder farmer in the Republic of Moldova, where rising temperatures and dwindling water supplies make it one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in Europe.
Ion and his wife raise livestock on a farm he helped finance with a series of Kiva loans. They have navigated a rough political climate and Moldova’s rocky economy, neither of which could move them from their ancestral home.
“We stayed, because we were always linked to the lands,” avows Ion.
But climate change presents different potential challenges, and Kiva is working to fortify the livelihoods and resilience of smallholder farmers like Ion through solutions such as:
Regenerative agriculture, which helps farmers secure more consistent yields
Reducing vulnerability of underbanked borrowers with more financial products and services, such as crop and flood insurance programs
Addressing CO2 reduction and energy inequity by enabling the growth of clean energy
Expanding water, sanitation, and hygiene systems fundamental to human health
“Together, we are not just scaling financial solutions; we are supporting communities to safeguard their livelihoods and adapt to the growing impacts of climate change,” writes Kiva CEO Vishal Ghotge on the organization’s capacity-building goals.
Scaling for adaptation
The work of providing risk-tolerant, crowdfunded capital to MFIs and communities they serve just got another boost: Kiva, in partnership with World Wildlife Fund, is included in the recent $20M investment from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for climate change innovators.
Not only will this help Kiva continue to assess local financial products and provide training and consulting to more of its Lending Partners, it will allow those partners to offer more climate-smart loans, crop insurance, and savings programs to more farmers in the world’s most vulnerable places.
“We’re building the capacity of our partners to increase the climate resilience of the smallholder farmers they work with,” simplifies Schenk, speaking to the enormous impact of the GEF grant.
Preparing for a changing planet requires creativity and collaboration. The innovations that help farmers withstand climate change might not be able to control the weather, but they can create a more financially-tolerant livelihood for the people who grow our food.
And that helps feed us all.
